Reading time: About 1 minute
I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about a series of similes from Sy Montgomery…
Described by the Boston Globe as, “part Indiana Jones and part Emily Dickinson,” Sy Montgomery is an American naturalist, author and scriptwriter. She writes about the natural world with a sense of wonder and adventure.
Montgomery learned how to scuba dive for her celebrated 2015 book, The Soul of an Octopus — essential reading for anyone interested in the remarkably intelligent eight-limbed mollusc. (If you enjoyed the Netflix film, My Octopus Teacher, you’ll certainly enjoy Montgomery’s book.) When reading, I was struck by her great skill with descriptive language and her ability to wield a simile. Here are my favourite examples:
- Athena rises up from her lair like steam from a pot.
- Wilson hands him [a sea star] a capelin [a fish] with the same easy motion with which one might pass the butter dish to a guest at the dinner table.
- As soon as Kali [an octopus] sees the lid coming, she starts scrambling out, rising over the top like the foaming head on a beer.
- Corals pout like the lips of giants, and point like the fingers of skeletons. Sea fans flutter more delicately than the finest lace.
- The ocean, for me, is what LSD was to Timothy Leary.
- A school of iridescent pin and yellow fish slide by inches from our masks, then wheel in unison like birds in the sky.
- We enter the ocean by waking overboard, shuffling on our big fins, an entry method called “performing the giant stride” It sounds stately and accomplished, but doing it, even Jacques Cousteau looked like he’d just left Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks…In a heartbeat, the diver is reborn, swallowed into another reality, transformed from a shambling monster into a being of weightless grace.
